Remember when there was a time where product reviews were legit? They'd heavily influence your purchases, as you trusted said source to give you the facts. Those days are long-gone. Let's take a look here once again via the gaming lifestyle. Here you used to be able to get a review stating replay value, quality of gameplay, hell, quality of the game overall. Well those days are gone.
Journalists these days, along with the sites they work for have been for the most part, turned into advertising companies. Not just all those annoying ads on their sites, but what they're reviewing itself can seemingly reserve buffs and nerfs pending on what the publisher/developer perhaps is offering them via revenue bucks. These people know how "reviews" can influence your very wallet, and it has shown in numerous manners. For example, it's been suspected, and in cases noted that developers receive bonuses based on the "Meta-Critic" rating. Meta Critic is a site known to gather reviews of games and such and post them up for consumers to have a one-stop research spot. General thought is, higher the score, better the product. But let's take a closer look shall we?
Call of Duty has become a juggernaut. It's the best selling franchise of this gen, and it's not losing any steam. There's always a ton of advertising to be had (sometimes this budget is 2 or more times the budget for developing the game itself), and if you give something a favorable review you "may be compensated" better, well, potentially. So, anyways, Call of Duty (CoD) Black Ops was the most recent release to discuss here. As we ALL very much know, this game was released on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC. If you cared to glance over reviews you'd think the game was perfect, an adrenaline rush like you never experienced. You rush out to the midnight sale for the next iteration in the series, come home, tear that case open with whatever even remotely qualified object you can find, and throw it in. So you get in the game, expect to be amazed, battles about to begin, and here, we, g... Um, g... G... WTF. Connection error *insert long ass character code*. How can this be? I didn't see this mentioned. It's an online game, and as we all know all too well, things happen. After the game is finally up and running, hours, maybe days later, and here, we, go! 3, 2, 1, begin... to fall through an invisible hole. WTF take 2. Anyways, long story short, you get to finally get it to work, you notice crazy amounts of disconnections, wall glitches, imbalances, and worst of all, LAG. Online gamings snake in the garden of Eden. And these things are easily noticeable, and quite often. So why wasn't this mentioned?
The newest trend as we all know is "Exclusive First Reviews". These will assure you to get your site it's hits as it's one of the first articles and videos of the game in action. So how do you obtain said exclusives? Well in many cases it's suspect to be known that it's based on what SCORE your review gives said game. Score it higher, you win an earlier green light to publish, perhaps days or weeks in advance of the game's official response.
Games of higher hype thresholds will garner more interest. This can be from favorable preview, demos, or it could be the follow up to the wildly successful prior iteration of the series. Like I said, as we well know, Black Ops was plagued, riddled with problems. Disconnects, lag, screen tearing, graphical glitches, wall glitches, and cheaters. "Bu-bu-bu I only had a couple hours or days to test out this game, I didn't see these issues", yes, the "get out of jail free" card of gaming " journalism. Then WAIT to release accurate observations of what happens when the game goes live. If one version is noticeably worse than another, don't throw down the other famous tactic, the blanket statement "nearly identical, not gaming changing differences". This is simply non-sense. There are people who are subject to noticing these deficiencies more so than others, and some people suffer things like headaches even due to screen tearing and frame rate drops. Then again, some of these things are noticed in offline play and get "overlooked" or "written off".
Then you have other game reviews where some how, some way, the reviewer will complain about the lack of a feature, yet it's right there in front of them... usually by lesser backed titles. They'll mis-report number of players, content, bugs-glitches, and imbalances a lot of the time. We're only human, so people make mistakes, but journalists are not people many of the times as we've seen this gen, they're business people..
Bottom Line: Don't trust these reviewers as they lack integrity these days, being more of an extension of an advertising service, more than a "reader knowledge service". Take everything with a grain of salt. If you want to wait and see how things pan out, you're better off reading forums and seeing what other gamers have to say, which while not 100% trust worthy themselves for various reasons, but you have better odds of being able to form your own judgement from a wealth of info rather than a few "pre-approved" reviews. Buying day one is a risk, but if the prior game was incredible to you, that helps ease your mind for sure...
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